When students vote in the Duke Student Government executive elections Tuesday, they will also weigh in on two separate referenda calling for increases in the DSG and the Duke University Union's components of the student activities fee.
One referendum proposes an increase of $8.50 per semester in the DSG portion of the fee. The Union is requesting an increase of $11 per semester for its fee portion.
For either referendum to pass, though, 33 percent of the student body needs to vote. In past years, between election hiccups and runoffs, roughly that percentage of the student body have participated in the executive elections.
Currently, each student pays $128 for the year, or $64 per semester, in student activities fees. If students approve both measures, each student would pay another $19.50 per semester--a total of $167 per year or $83.50 per semester--in student activities fees per year.
Of the $128 that each student currently pays, $72 is managed by the Student Organizational Finance Committee--a DSG-affiliated body that funds the 200-plus DSG-chartered and recognized groups through annual budgets.
The Union--the major programming body on campus--receives the other $56 per year, or $28 per semester, from each student's activities fee.
In total, SOFC managed about $432,000 this year. With the proposed increase in DSG's portion of the student activities fee, an additional $120,000 would go to SOFC to fund student groups.
SOFC chair Pushpa Raja said students would only be allocating part of the 5 percent tuition increase next year to go toward student activities.
"The money will be part of that 5 [percent] increase," the junior said. "It's money that students will be paying for [in] that tuition cost increase no matter what."
SOFC last requested a hike in the DSG portion of the fee in the early 1990s. Over the past 10 years, Raja said, technical and honoraria costs have increased exponentially while SOFC has only adjusted its fee for inflation. "Right now we get requests for over $1 million worth of funds [per year], and we can only fund about 40 percent of that," she said.
For Jesse Panuccio, president of the Union, the activities fee is virtually his organization's only source of income besides ticket sales revenue.
"We are the largest programming body and the oldest on campus," Panuccio said. "We are asked to do a lot of the programming for this school, and we'd like to give this campus what it really deserves."
However, with technical and contracting costs rising dramatically, Panuccio said the Union has not been able to fund big-name events on campus.
"If you look at the level of programming that we had in the 1980s and 1990s... we used to bring Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead and REM [to campus]," the senior said.
With an increase in their portion of the fee, the Union plans to combat those costs and host more big-name performers and speakers again by increasing the funding for its Major Attractions and Major Speakers committees.
The money would also go toward lowering student ticket prices, increasing the number of performances per group on campus and funding the new small programs committee that organizes more casual events, such as weekend bands at the Armadillo Grill.
Most recently in 1998, students voted to raise the Union's component of the fee by $5 per year.
"We've had five years of growth, growth of costs, growth of the organization," Panuccio said, adding that the $5 increase was not enough. "We've really hit the point where we can't expand any more without better space, better funding, [and] a larger growth plan that we've been pursuing over the past years."
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